June 2026

Last week? Not my favorite week. My dog injured her leg while playing with other dogs in the park. My basement needed some emergency masonry work. My acid reflux graduated from intermittent warning shots to full-on assault. But somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to finish up a project I’ve been chipping away at for countless hours over the past 10 months: manually adding metadata to the nearly 6,000 old tweets I’ve… See more →

It’s still a sad mystery how the Philly screening(s?) of Eno, a groundbreaking documentary about famed musician and producer Brian Eno, came and went early last year without crossing my radar. I’ve met the filmmakers, Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, on various occasions in the past and would have loved to say hi and get eyes on Brain One, the generative engine they built for the film, with hardware designed by Teenage Engineering. As the… See more →

None of the tunes and few of the faces and stories in this doc will be unfamiliar to thrash aficionados, but as someone who always felt a strong connection to the music and no connection at all to the beer-soaked mayhem that fueled it, I was most interested in the glancing references made to the adults in the room, some of whom were new to me. Metal Blade Records honcho Brian Slagel; Ruthie’s Inn proprietor/promoter… See more →

My good friend and web design hero Ethan Marcotte has redesigned his personal site for the second time in a little over a year, and it’s a thing of beauty. Every last bit of it is thoughtfully considered without being overworked, from the simple structure, to the inventive grid, to the elegant typography, to the subtle textural motifs. And that joyful splash of watercolor at the top! For the nerds, there are some clever implementations… See more →

After seeing the film, I watched Kane Parsons’s entire Backrooms series on YouTube. Though there are some tells here and there that it’s the work of a teenager (and one who’s played a lot of Portal), he’s clearly a prodigious talent, and it’s easy to see why A24 scooped him up to make a feature. Parsons didn’t invent the Backrooms concept—essentially an empty (or is it?), windowless, inescapable yellow maze of a corporate campus—and I’m… See more →

We’ve been prepping my childhood home for an estate sale taking place in a few weeks, and my primary task has been getting my remaining unsalable old junk out of there. A lot of it has turned out to be assignments from college: a big stack of portfolios filled with charcoal nudes and various graphic design things mounted on black boards with tracing paper overlays for professors’ commentary. Sketches, marker comps, paste-ups, digital prints. Typesetting,… See more →